It was because of Daniel that Mary Ann remembered Tom again; because she’d found out about Daniel’s latest affair. “Latest” was how she would position it to everyone now; one of an incalculable number—whether spaced apart or pressed together didn’t matter anymore because Mary Ann could only see a faceless mass of paramours sprawled one across the other like bacteria floating desultorily beneath a microscope.
Daniel had played the only card he had left, complaining about how long she’d sat on the knowledge and how she’d chosen to confront him when he was about to catch a flight to visit his sick mother, probably to see her for the last time. He’d used the word “scheming” as he punched his arms into his jacket, and she’d laughed at his big baby anger. But, as he stepped his shoes on, he seemed to think his way into a movie scene and returned to place his hands on her shoulders and to tell her he was sorry, and that he loved her.
“I’ll call you when I land,” he’d said.
“I’ll put you onto the girls,” she’d replied, closing the door slowly but firmly.
She’d heard his shoes crunch forlornly and forcibly on the gravel driveway and heard him grunt “Bitch!” before the clunk of a car door and the long electronic whine of his Uber leaving.
Alone, she poured a glass of white wine and watched a reality TV show about affluent Londoners almost half her age where the weekly relationship melodrama depended on the word-of-mouth testimony and half-remembered memories of a hard-drinking and careless cast. Of course, she’d always accepted that the premise of the show would disintegrate if the cast members were allowed to sprint pitch side to confirm what had really happened, like a referee in a football match ruling out an offside call. In this way, she’d allowed herself to enjoy the participants’ antics without committing to the idiocy of the premise, but the sudden debilitation of her own love-life had brought the previously unappreciated reality element of the show into sharp relief and after twenty minutes of rumour-fueled enchantment followed by a series of cruel and common betrayals she switched the TV off and turned on her laptop.
She mixed a loose gin and tonic and surfed old 90s music online; frantic, dancer-laden and game semi-or-fully-dubbed live performances from shows like Top of The Pops. Even though, in some cases, the recordings were almost thirty years old, the participants still glowed with the sheen and irrepressible beauty of youth.
The Spice Girls daisy-chaining to “Wannabe” like a toolbelt of pop perfection, Britney rocking her wireless headset like a sexed-up call center operator. Saffron from Republica performing “Ready to Go” and attempting to gin up a listless audience by shrieking repeatedly into the front row.
She didn’t recall Tom until she hit Suede’s Saturday night, the opening guitar riff and the light yearning of Brett Anderson’s falsetto melting into her ears.
He’s not her usual type. She normally goes for clean-cut, blonde, smart-casual types but he’s slim and dark-featured, his black denim shirt spilling over his blue jeans, the top button undone, the dark gully of his tanned neck visible in the sticky light of Coppers nightclub.
He’s moving rhythmically and casually towards her, passing in and out of view as he rolls through the crowd with an ease that makes everyone around him seem insubstantial. Everyone but her, because the dark, smiling eyes stay on her as he navigates the swaying press.
Now, he is so close, she can see the tiny circles of light swaying in the darkness of his irises.
As the song builds, he takes her hand in his and she feels the warm curl of his palm as their fingers interlock and the tiny overture of a nail travels along her spine and he moves into her space and she into his and they inhabit the music while their lips, at first tentatively, seek, then fiercely, pursue.
The sun empties upon their naked bodies as they wake in her single bed, unknotting slowly and experimentally while they exchange amazed smiles, as though recipients of an unexpected gift.
Even dressed, he takes five attempts to finally leave, returning each time to touch noses and kiss her and to remind her how beautiful she is and, each time, she replies with a bright, clerical “Why, thank you” which makes him grin until finally he is gone and she examines his name—his full name—and phone number carefully inscribed on a torn section of tissue box and she swings her naked legs about and laughs.
For their first real date, they go to the cinema. The film is a mainstream romantic vehicle; his suggestion but while they get drinks and popcorn, he stands apart from her with his head down as though hiding his identity. The shyness of the brightly lit foyer gives way to the comfort of darkness, and they touch and kiss and might even pretend the burgeoning onscreen romance bears some affinity to their own until, at the moment of consummation, as a slow song beckons the first onscreen kiss, the voice of a man in the audience nearby launches a distinctive, full-throated and uncontrollable laugh which the rest of the audience, including them, join into until the whole theatre is a roaring, hooting, vibrating mess. The romantic denouement, when it comes, plays out beneath an undignified aftershock of giggles.
She goes back to his flat in a three-story Georgian house on the Southside. The downstairs hallway smells of curry and old smoke damage and the corners rattle with the enraged dither of trapped bluebottles, but his apartment is surprisingly spacious and clean, and she feels an exotic charge as they undress slowly in front of each other under the high ceiling with the bulbs blazing around them.
Afterwards, she is lying against him, a pond of blond hair spilling over his chest. The main lights have been turned off and the orange glow from the lamp reminds her of a spotlight and lends a theatrical immediacy to their conversation.
She points at the wall of books.
“Have you read them all?”
“They’re mostly to impress my sexual conquests.”
She strokes his face to hers and gives him a long teasing kiss.
“Mmmm, it’s working.”
“You’re a scientist, right?” he says.
“Student scientist,” she corrects.
“You think the World Wide Web will kill off bookshops?”
“I don’t think so.” She smiles. “People will always need places. We met in a place, didn’t we?”
“What a place.”
“My grandfather used to say that we’re only ever born in one place but when we die, we die everywhere.”
He stares thoughtfully into the shadows on the edge of the lamplight.
“Your grandfather sounds very wise.” He laughs. “And a bit dark. If this internet thing of yours catches on, maybe that’ll change and we’ll finally be able to die in one place, though knowing my luck it’ll probably be Geocities.”
She gestures to the wall of bookshelves.
“If it does catch on, I can always come to your place to get my fix of old-fashioned printed words.”
“Anytime. You know old-fashioned printed words can save your life?”
“Oh yeah?”
She is waiting for him to make a playful joke. Instead, he slowly disengages from her, from them, and, still naked, scans the shelves gravely and returns with a slim, unadorned paperback. When he’s reintegrated beneath her, he hands her the book and she studies the title conscientiously.
“Darkness Visible?”
“Uh huh.”
She turns it around and reads the blurb and the reviews on the back then turns to look him in the eyes.
“This saved your life?”
He nods shyly and she caresses his cheek and ear and kisses him tenderly.
“Oh baby.”
But she has imprecise reservations.
He is everything she isn’t. Dark. Wounded. Opaque.
When she talks about her family and their modest but supportive upbringing, he nods and smiles but she can see in his eyes that he has no frame of reference for this, and she may as well be relating a popular myth which he is only hearing for the first time.
He says next to nothing about his family, except to imply he hasn’t seen them in a while and what he hears of them now are whispers he would prefer remain unamplified.
She tells him about her college courses, specialties and plans; plans that stretch into a far flung tomorrow of homes and children. He is amazed that anyone can plan so far ahead and in such detail. All his plans begin in maybes and end in places that sound like the start of a movie in which the protagonists all die horribly.
“Maybe you can come visit me over there someday,” he says but then shakes his head, embarrassed at fastening her to such whimsy.
“Someday,” she says with a smile and a kiss.
They have their first fight a week later. They’re in Coppers again and they’ve both drunk too much. He’s angry about the never-ending parade of guys hitting on her every time he returns from the toilets.
“What can I do?” she says.
“You could try not being so damn friendly,” he says. “You like those guys in t-shirts that are two sizes too small for them. Wait and see: you’ll end up leaving me for one of them.”
She laughs but her denial isn’t quick or passionate enough for him because they end up exchanging mis-heard provocations in the club then shouting at one another, no less incoherently, on the street outside and she cries and takes a cab home alone. He lights a cigarette and smokes sullenly as she gets into the taxi and she imagines him watching as her cab is absorbed into the exodus of lights on Harcourt Street.
The next morning, she mopes around her apartment, finally drawn to the mailbox downstairs where she finds a hand-written unstamped envelope with her name on it. She recognises his handwriting.
She extracts and unfolds a single sheet of white paper with a poem carefully handwritten on it:
Breakfast, Morning After
Everything on this plate is overcooked,
I am too.
Last night’s sentimentality boiled over,
Now, it’s stuck on the pan of our two minds,
Like incomprehensible glue.
It’s the first time she’s received a poem that wasn’t written by a greeting card company.
She returns to her apartment and dials his number, which is on the same piece of cardboard he’d first written it on, and which has sat by the phone since she got home the night before.
His phone rings for an antagonistically long time but she keeps it to her ear until, finally, his downstairs neighbour answers it by bellowing the name of his company followed by his own name.
Before either of them can say anything else, she hears a noise in the background and a smile in the neighbour’s voice as he somewhat demurely adds, “He’s coming now.”
A few seconds later Tom’s voice gasps, “Mary Ann?”
“I got your poem.”
“I need to see you.”
They last another two weeks. Two weeks of late-night club-crawling followed by all night lovemaking and all-day shut-ins. She misses so many classes that the head of her department calls to check if she’s okay and, at Tom’s encouragement, she bereaves herself of a beloved aunt-or was it was an abhorred uncle?
Both feel themselves on the cusp of something, but neither can square the circle of difference that lies between them; the forking of paths already beneath their feet.
Fittingly, it ends in Coppers.
They both sense what’s coming and this foreknowledge lends an astral tenderness to the night. They sit in the beer garden so they can speak.
She breaks the deadlock.
“I’ve got to go back to classes or they’re going to turf me out.”
He laughs and takes her hands in his.
“I’ve got my plane ticket,” he says.
“You’re really going? That’s great, baby. I’m so happy for you.”
“I guess you shamed me into it with all those plans of yours that stretch into 2050.”
They drink and make out and, near the end of the night, Suede’s “Saturday Night” is played. They rush inside and slow dance to it, folding into the mass of people on the floor until it feels like they are alone, the pirouetting axis of a cosy circle of darkness.
Her memories slip on the gleaming surface of the past and when she recovers the memory, he is walking her to the taxi rank one last time, made debonair in her reconstruction with his jacket on her shoulders against the sudden cold.
“I’ve got a confession to make,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“You know that movie we went to, where the guy started laughing during the love scene?”
“Yeah.”
“I went to see that film the day before I brought you, to make sure it was romantic enough to take you to. It’s not really my area so I needed to do a bit of research.”
She stops to caress his cheek.
“Oh, that’s so sweet baby.”
“It was, until that guy tore the arse out of it.”
“I guess now we know why he was laughing.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess we do.”
She reaches the head of the queue and hands him his jacket and they kiss one last time.
“Good luck with the future,” he says.
“You too,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see you in a place there someday.”
“Someday.”
She imagines herself not looking back and allowing him to disappear unseen into the anonymous crowd, but she can’t help seeing him standing there, staring at her taxi as it fades into the night, so perhaps she did look back one last time. She imagines their eyes meeting in that final look and something, unsaid, passing between them but can’t remember if that’s really what happened or only what she wanted to have happened.
Mary Ann snaps back into the moment. Her phone shows three missed calls from Daniel but she scorns them and the voice in her head and pours herself another drink.
She searches the internet for Tom using his full name and studies the images that come back, trying to match them to an imagined Tom who is 24 years older or to remove 24 years from the faces she sees but none of them have the dark eyes she remembers so vividly.
She feels wrong about Googling the poem after all this time but a sudden wave of doubt that it might not have been original persuades her to search for it and the resulting screen of irrelevances prompts a loud sigh of relief.
She searches Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, imagining as she does a settled-down but still-handsome Tom, spared a paunch and receding hairline with the concession of just a few strategically placed lines about the eyes and an intrigue of grey above one temple. A Tom who is finally free of doubt, hauling a wife and kids into a boring, normal future. A Tom who offers chirpy updates or pithy quotes. But this Tom is nowhere to be found on Google or social networks or anywhere else on the internet so, with a narrow pout of satisfaction, she imagines an unplugged free spirit in a remote beach bar on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and she imagines a transistor radio on the small bar playing Suede’s “Saturday Night” and this Tom pausing to remember her, perhaps even this very night.
She goes back to YouTube and replays the song and closes her eyes, remembering again the two of them dancing inside that cosy circle of darkness.
But Tom is not sitting at a beach bar by the Caribbean Sea. He’s not had a wife or kids and he’s never used Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because in 2003, when Mary Ann was on secondment for her company in Seattle, Tom was walking his dog by the Grand Canal in the early hours of the morning, not two miles from where she is at this moment, and the dog jumped into the water by the lock. And Tom, without a moment’s hesitation, dived in after it and got into trouble, the dog somehow escaping but Tom’s hands scrabbling uselessly at the slippery walls until the air poured out of him and he sank into the dark water, the circle of light, that was the sun, diffusing into darkness above him.
Feature Image: René Magritte, The Lovers II, 1928.